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Orenco Station

Neighborhood by Design

By Fred Gillette

It’s a very diverse crowd of youngsters, old timers and business-attired
commuters hopping off the streetcar on this pleasant, sunny autumn afternoon.

What the dozen or so riders share is the common destination of Orenco Station,
a “transit oriented”, planned neighborhood lying about 10 miles
north-west of the center of Portland, Oregon. This attractively landscaped station
stands in the midst of one of this nation’s more advanced examples of
town planning.

As a student and advocate of community health and well being, I have visited
a good number of places, checking out the successes or failures of a variety
of neighborhood improvement projects. Numerous communities possess some of the
elements of Ornenco Station. But, although I’ve heard they exist, I can
count the number of fully realized, planned communities like this I’ve
seen on one finger. Although there will be additional expansion, what now exists
is fully functional. It has diverse housing, a variety of parks and recreation
opportunities and a healthy retail town center providing local employment within
walking distance for everyone. Also, centrally positioned, is the streetcar
station which gives Orenconians access to greater Portland without having to
pump any petrol.

Portland has been purposefully building its light rail system (MAX) while encouraging
and supporting transit-oriented development near stations. This is not an easy
sell in already existing communities where neighbors may have to be convinced
that accepting higher density is now, somehow, a good thing. Many believe high
density to be antithetical to their idealized views of neighborhood and community.
How does my side yard, triple car garage and croquette course fit into this
picture? Why should I have to listen to my neighbor’s music? Nor is the
notion of readily available mass transit such an obvious selling point to many
of us who have long been enamored of our autos.

There are those, however, who believe that the disadvantages of high density
can be effectively dealt with. And when they have been, there arise numerous
advantages…particularly when coupled with convenient mass transit. At
Orenco Station, some Oregon urban planners have had the good fortune to be given
a clean slate to experiment with related theories of community engineering.
Or perhaps we should say, a cleaned slate. The land upon which Orenco Station
resides was actually the site of an old company town of the Oregon Nursery Company.
It even had a streetcar connection to Portland. Alas, the town fell upon hard
times during the depression of the ‘30s. To complete its evolution into
modern times, even the street car tracks were ripped up. Who needs those when
you’ve got a freeway coming to town?

Fast forward to 1990s. Portland’s Westside light-rail was approved. In
order to receive local light-rail funding, the encompassing community of Hillsboro
would have to rezone the land around the proposed station site from commercial-only
to mixed use. Holder of the station site, PacTrust, could have easily tied up
the project in litigation. After all, they did make the investment with the
intention of developing a commercial-only property. Instead, they decided to
go against conventional suburban development wisdom and try for a kind of development
that was truly in the spirit of the mass-transit -oriented vision. They brought
Costa Pacific Homes into the project, a residential developer with local experience.
Much collaboration with local and regional planners ensued. Most importantly,
market researchers measured the interests and desires of potential members of
the new community. Fifteen hundred respondents expressed concern for attaining
such amenities as walkable streets, neighborhood shopping and meeting places,
commuting options and living somewhere that exuded a true sense of community.
Orenco Station was not to be a product of just some civic development theorists
and bean counters. Most steps of the process involved heavy citizen input.
The result is a neighborhood with a great variety of housing types surrounding
a town center. Communal greens provide refreshing vistas and promote interaction
of neighbors. Paths allow easy, non-automotive travel. Shops are within walking
distance from all the homes, condos and apartments and the streetcar station
is in the center of it all.

In most terms, it seems the project has been a success. Sales have been high
and homes command 25% higher sales prices than comparable properties in the
region. Concerns expressed by traditional developers that smaller property sizes
and alley-accessible garages would dissuade buyers turned out to be baseless.
Buyers and renters seem receptive to design approaches that promote a sense
of community and safety such as narrow streets, front porches, and houses placed
relatively close to sidewalks.

So, has heaven, at last, been successfully replicated on Earth? Well, perhaps
not totally. There are many home shoppers who find the 18 homes-per-acre density
a bit high. Although privacy issues were consciously addressed in home design,
there are those who feel they would still prefer having a neighbor 40 feet away
to having one 20 feet away…particularly when there are exuberant familial
exchanges or over-amped media assaults. Of course, living anywhere is always
a combination of plusses and minuses. It does seem, that for a large number
of people living at Orenco Station, that the plusses outnumber the minuses.

Most of us, however, do not have the opportunity to live in a town planned
for optimization of our quality of life. Most of our neighborhoods and towns
are an amalgam of often-haphazard plans and happenstances. Planning that did
exist often was under the control of people who didn’t necessarily understand
(or care) what kinds of urban design maximized neighborliness or sense of community.
Not that they were necessarily uncaring people; they were simply most often
motivated by immediate short term concerns that motivate most of us. We take
the starting point that has been given us and make the best we can of it. So
what, beyond envy, might we get from looking at this particular community when
it does not represent a practical reality for the vast majority of us?

The advantage to be gained from looking closely at Orenco Station is our apparent
ability to skip ahead through time and see where some of our planning ideals
might take us. Rather than examining only the results of some tentative steps
in this direction, we can see what living in the fully realized, nearly idealized
version would be like. We can see if these ideals really produce the results
we would hope for. We may then be even better equipped to judge if it is worth
the trouble and expense to proceed in these directions. If we find that narrower
streets really do better promote community and provide greater safety, we can
look at retrofit solutions to achieve the same ends in existing neighborhoods,
such as decreasing the number of lanes or installing traffic calming devices.
If having mini parks can promote more neighborly exchanges and not just provide
meeting places for undesirables, perhaps we can carve more such spaces into
existing neighborhoods. If convenient, efficient mass transit can really be
used and appreciated, perhaps we will approach existing transit improvement
with more vigor. If life can be tolerable with greater density, perhaps we can
allow it and reap some benefits. The neighborhood coffee shop that would whither
in a conventional suburb or low-density neighborhood may prosper and become
a kind of community center with strollers parked outside in a higher density
neighborhood. The occasional annoyance of a proximate neighbor may be balanced
by an increased positive sense of community and neighborliness …a feeling
difficult to attain in most quiet suburbs. And so on.

A 2002 study comparing Orenceo Station to two other more traditional nearby
communities provides some objective data, allowing us to go a bit beyond social
theorizing. Bruce Podobnik, sociology professor at Lewis and Clark College led
research which sought to address questions of the effectiveness of the social
planning behind Orenco Station. The main questions addressed were: has the project
been successful in fostering a sense of community? What are the reactions to
living in a relatively high-density community? And has the proximity to mass
transit fostered a decreased reliance on the automobile? Podobnik concludes
that this design and actualization has indeed fostered a higher level of community
cohesion and “neighborliness” than found in similar communities.
Residents also feel comfortable with the level of density. The reliance on the
automobile, however, does not seem significantly diminished in Orenco, although
there is a reported increased use of mass transit. The author notes that there
may be some effects of self-selection in the study. That is, Orenco Station
has residents who chose to live there because of their desires for a greater
sense of community and had already accepted the increase in density. What seems
irrefutable, however, is confirmation that the design of the community has enhanced
the likelihood of this predisposition toward neighborliness and community to
be fulfilled.

Certainly more research is quite warranted and likely forthcoming. Perhaps
there can be some measurements made of sense of allegiance to community and
more detailed assessments of comparative quality of life. My personal observations
do reveal some problems in paradise, some of which may be especially difficult
to successfully address. The most striking is the four lane thoroughfare that
bisects the neighborhood. Through noise and motion it is not only a stark sensual
contrast to the rest of the neighborhood, it stands as a kind of boundary between
the north and south ends. To keep the large volume of traffic moving, there
is often a long wait for a pedestrian wishing to cross the boulevard.

A person strolling across the otherwise bucolic neighborhood thus encounters
this noisy, noxious barrier of fast-moving traffic. Of course there are good
reasons for not disrupting or re-routing a popular thoroughfare. But its effects
are, nevertheless, jarring and in stark contrast to the objectives of a cohesive
neighborhood otherwise engineered to foster pedestrian comfort and geographic
intimacy. The other major difficulty is the uphill battle to build communities
that are less automobile reliant. Research supports that developing better transport
access in your own neighborhood is not necessarily sufficient. If the trip to
work still takes 2 or 3 times as long using public transportation, most people
will largely, and unsurprisingly, opt for the car. The hope is that, further
development of mass transit routes will make leaving the car behind an ever-more
practical and pleasant option. Perhaps we may also someday find that we can
accomplish more than we’ve allowed ourselves to imagine without leaving
our neighborhood…but that’s a topic for another time.

Despite a few reservations, I believe that Orenco Station does stand as an excellent
example of where our dreams of improved community life may take us. It is certainly
worthy of our close scrutiny…now, and into the future. Should you plan
to visit Portland, do go visit the Rose Garden and other lovely local parks
as well as the Pittock Mansion and the Chinese Gardens and the Saturday Market
and the thriving arts neighborhood and the beautiful, functional downtown. Also,
please consider hopping the trolley to visit a real Tomorrow Land.